Procedural Memory - What Is Memory: Improving Memory Understanding Age Related Memory Loss
Content provided by the Faculty of the Harvard Medical School
Procedural memory
Procedural memory, also known as implicit memory, refers to the memory of skills and routines. You draw on procedural memories automatically to perform actions like getting dressed or driving your car. How to ride a bicycle, write in cursive, operate a video recorder — each of these skills required effort and practice at one time, but once you mastered it, you were able to perform it without remembering how you learned it or the separate steps involved. The very fact that you are able to perform the skill demonstrates that learning and memory have taken place. When you take out your bike for a ride, you don't say to yourself, "Okay, first I straddle the seat, then I put my left foot on the left pedal, and then I push off the ground with my right foot…" You just get on and go. It's as though your body does the remembering for you.
In contrast to declarative memory, procedural memory is more resistant to aging and illness. Individuals with Alzheimer's can perform many routine tasks until well into the disease process. Scientists aren't sure why this happens, but it may be because this type of memory is more widely distributed throughout the brain.
Doctors learned how resilient procedural memory is in 1953, after operating on a young man in Connecticut (now famous in the medical literature as patient "H.M.") who sought relief from epileptic seizures. Taking desperate measures to stop the seizures, doctors removed large portions of both medial temporal lobes, including his hippocampus, a structure deep within the brain that is often the focus of epilepsy and is a vital component of the brain's memory system. Although the surgery controlled H.M.'s epilepsy, it left him with amnesia, a devastating impairment of memory (see "Amnesia: Memory loss caused by injury or trauma"). Although H.M. was utterly unable to learn new factual information and create new episodic memories, his procedural memory was largely unaffected. Similarly, studies in which patients with amnesia spend time each day practicing new activities, such as playing computer games, suggest that they can learn new skills. Although the amnesic patients often can't recall ever having played or even seen the computer games, their performance improves over time and with practice, indicating that they are capable of acquiring new procedural memories.
Flashbulb memoryMemory researchers use the term "flashbulb memory" to describe a vivid memory of an unexpected, emotionally charged public event. The assassination of President Kennedy, the Challenger space shuttle disaster, and the destruction of the World Trade Center are all examples of compelling public events that became ingrained in the memories of many who witnessed them, either directly or through television. Flashbulb memories tend to include numerous minute details associated with your experience of the event — where you were standing, what you were doing, who was around you, and so on. It is likely that the combination of profound meaningfulness and emotional impact surrounding the event serves to intensively inscribe it in long-term memory. Experts used to assume that flashbulb memories remained more accurate over time than ordinary memories, but research has shown that they are vulnerable to the same biases and distortions as memories of less dramatic events. |
| Last updated: | January 23, 2007 |
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Medical content reviewed by the Faculty of the Harvard Medical School. Harvard Health Publications, Copyright © 2007 by President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. Used with permission of StayWell.
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